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Recovery Yoga

We offer yoga therapy for addictions and habits that you want to change. Whether the issue is food, alcohol, prescription drugs, or tobacco, we work with you to achieve goals of moderation or abstinence. We use specific yoga and meditation practices to enhance self regulation and self soothing, dealing with cravings, provide a healthy focus in life, provide accountability, and to increase overall well being, while working towards long term recovery. Our work is confidential and discreet.

Most of the people we work with wish to address issues around alcohol. For some people moderation is the best outcome. For others, abstinence is easier. There are studies that show that the majority of problem drinkers are able to learn to drink in a manner that is controlled and safe.

A major US study found that only 25.5% of the alcoholics ever received treatment - most of them made progress in their recovery more or less by themselves. Of the thousands of alcoholics in the study, 25% remained alcohol dependent (unrecovered), 18.2% managed to abstain and 17.7% had become low risk drinkers. The rest fell somewhere in-between active alcoholism and low risk drinking.

Some treatment providers, and groups like AA, insist that people abstain completely in order to recover. They may feel that controlled drinking is too risky, or that if you can go from alcoholism to controlled drinking that perhaps you never were a "real" alcoholic. But this all or nothing approach can also be risky. There are some people who can never safely recover any other way than through absolute abstinence, and, there may be times in your recovery when that is what you have to do to make progress, but there are also many problem drinkers who appear to be able to recover without complete abstinence.

The possibility of recovery outside of a formal setting is quite possible. It's great if you can abstain, but what if you simply can't do so but you can manage to reduce your drinking to more or less safe levels? You need to know that there's a good chance that you can recover even if you don't completely abstain.

There is research that indicates that if you start something like yoga, that you are more likely to give up a bad habit, more easily, as you will have started to heal, and eventually you realise that continuing with the bad habit is inconsistent with feeling better. The famous cardiologist, George Sheehan, stated that:​

The athlete doesn't stop smoking and start training. He starts training and finds he has stopped smoking. The athlete doesn't go on a diet and start training. He starts training and finds he is eating the right things at the right times.

We have other resources available on our research page. Please contact Shanti to discuss your needs.